Learn from Experience on Airport Security

Before the United States rushes into creating
a new 28,000-person federal passenger-screening bureaucracy, it
might make sense to start with a clean sheet of paper and ask what
kind of system would best do the job of keeping airports and air
travelers safe. The overwhelming evidence from other countries,
especially Israel, shows that federalizing airport security is not
the answer.

WHAT IS NEEDED

First , America needs a system that
safeguards an entire airport, with one party held responsible for
all aspects of its security. The Senate's current plan to
"federalize" passenger screening operations2 would do nothing
about controlling access to the rest of the airport for the
thousands of caterers, cleaners, refuelers, and many others who
currently lack mandatory background checks or secure identification
cards. Federal investigators have been able to breach security and
gain access to the tarmac on one out of every three tries--yet
these flaws are ignored by the Senate's proposal. The first thing
that must be done is to end the current fragmentation of services
by making a single entity responsible for all security at each
airport.

Second , America needs a system that is
flexible and forward-looking. When lives depend on security, it is
essential to be able to discipline and/or fire staffers who are
incompetent or untrustworthy. However, doing so is very hard if
those people are federal civil servants. Moreover, since new
technology may soon make it possible to let machines do more of the
boring job of bag inspection, flexibility will be needed to
reassign or retire people whose jobs are eliminated by that
technology. But that too is difficult to do in a federal
civil-service bureaucracy.

Third , policymakers need to take account
of the fact that passenger airports vary enormously in size and
design. Some have a central terminal; others have unit terminals.
Some have hotels and parking structures integrated into the
terminal; others do not. Some have extensive international service,
while others are exclusively domestic. Therefore, a
one-size-fits-all solution mandated from the top down is likely to
be a poor fit at many airports. A much wiser approach would be for
the federal government to set tough performance standards but let
each airport tailor its security systems to its unique
circumstances.

Fourth , with some humility, policymakers
should acknowledge that nobody yet has "the answer" for
implementing more effective but also affordable airport security.
All sorts of combinations of better X-ray machines, sophisticated
profiling to spot high-risk people, biometric ID cards for
employees and frequent fliers, and more are possible--at widely
varying costs and unknown degrees of effectiveness. A regime of
tough federal outcome standards could permit a healthy degree of
experimentation by the nation's several hundred major airports to
find out what really does work best.

WHAT WORKS OVERSEAS

It
turns out that this kind of system already exists in European
countries and Israel. These countries have a 20-year head start in
dealing with serious terrorist threats. Many tried the top-down,
"federalized" approach; after all, 20 years ago, many European
airports were run by national governments. But as part of
modernizing airport management, governments in Western Europe have
created self-supporting airport corporations for most major
airports.

Many
of those airport corporations have subsequently been
privatized--including facilities in Belfast, Copenhagen, Frankfurt,
London, Rome, and Vienna. Others, such as airports in Manchester
and Paris, remain government-owned but still operate on a
business-like, for-profit basis. In every case, national
governments in those countries retain regulatory oversight over the
airport companies. When it comes to security, it is the airport's
responsibility to meet those performance requirements--but the
means for doing so are up to each airport operator.

Some
of the airport companies, such as BAA, which runs London's Heathrow
and Gatwick, employ all passenger-screening staff themselves. Most,
however--including such high-risk airports as those in Amsterdam,
Belfast, Brussels, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Paris--hire
private security firms to do major portions of the work, especially
passenger screening. But because the airport owners are held
accountable for security by their national aviation safety
authorities, they insist on high levels of training and reasonable
pay and benefits for the people employed by the security firms.

Israel, too, used to provide all airport
security via national government employees; but about five years
ago, the Israelis opted for the European public-private partnership
model as well. A government agency known as Sherut Habitachon
Haklali (Shabak) sets the standards based on its assessment of
risks, issues directives to the airports, and evaluates their
performance. The Ben Gurion Airport Authority in Tel Aviv is
charged with full responsibility for meeting the security
requirements. It hires a private firm, Amishav, to do pre-boarding
screening and several other security functions. Another private
company, ICTS, provides passenger-profiling software to the Israeli
government.

Ironically, the three biggest security
firms in Europe--Securitas, Securicor, and ICTS--are the parent
companies of the U.S. firms that provide 60 percent of all
passenger screening here. Yet while turnover of European passenger
screeners runs between 10 percent and 50 percent per year, it is
typically between 100 percent and 400 percent in this country. The
reason: You get what you pay for. Since America's Federal Aviation
Administration (FAA) has set no standards for training, does very
little unannounced inspection, and issues only token fines, it is
no wonder that today's airports use poorly trained, minimum-wage
screeners.

Nowhere in Europe do individual airlines
hire security firms to do passenger screening, as is common
practice in the United States. Under this flawed system, since the
FAA imposes no standards for screeners, and since the airline
business is very cost-competitive, it is understandable that,
during a decade with virtually no hijackings, the airlines would
seek to carry out this function at the lowest cost. The result: the
phenomenon of security firms having to bid low prices in order to
get the contract and then being able to afford only minimally
trained and low-paid staff.

Today, with the tragic realization that
hijacking is a far more serious and deadly threat than anyone had
realized, it has become increasingly clear that America needs
higher standards not just for passenger screening, but for all
aspects of airport security. Workers with minimal training who are
paid only minimum wages are clearly not acceptable. And individual
airlines never should be expected to maintain safe and secure
airport premises--the job of the airport operator. As the
experience of Europe and Israel attests, airports are fully capable
of providing high-quality security under a regime of tough national
standards backed up by serious enforcement.

America does not need a large new federal civil-service
workforce for airport security. Rather, it needs much tougher
federal requirements imposed on airports that hold them fully
responsible for all aspects of security. Just as the FAA can impose
serious fines on airlines that violate safety rules, and even pull
their licenses to operate, so should it impose serious fines and
the threat of shutdown on airports that do not take their
responsibilities seriously.

AVOIDING THE PITFALLS

Earlier this year, Boston's Logan Airport
(from which two of the September 11 hijacked planes had originated)
threatened to impose fines on airlines that failed to speed
passengers through the security-screening process. Logan is the
same airport whose now-fired security director was the former
governor's driver. Such appointments are what happens when airports
are run by politicized bodies rather than world-class aviation
professionals. If Logan Airport had faced a serious possibility of
being shut down for security lapses, one questions whether such
practices would have occurred in the first place.

It
may be objected that some U.S. airports do not have the management
expertise to take on the full responsibility for airport security.
Such a scenario is, of course, shocking. To the extent that it may
apply at specific airports, however, there is an obvious remedy:
Hire one of the global airport-management companies that now
operate airports in Albany, Burbank, and Indianapolis, for
example.

Finally, some question how airports can
pay for the higher level of security that these times require.
Advocates of federalization argue for a uniform, nationwide tax of
several dollars on all airline tickets. But that approach, like the
existing ticket tax, requires all the money to flow to Washington,
where it becomes enmeshed in the federal budget process and must be
allocated by congressional committees, with all the usual political
horse-trading and pork-barreling.

A
better model is the passenger facility fee (PFC), under which
individual airports can opt to impose a charge of up to $4.50 per
passenger, which would be used for specific projects at that
airport and only that airport. The money stays at the airport,
under local control (subject to FAA oversight, to be sure it is
spent only on eligible airport improvement projects). This
decentralized approach would permit each airport to charge only
what is needed to upgrade its own security. Airports needing major
redesign of terminals, for example, would need to charge more than
those whose facilities need little or no modification.

CONCLUSION

In
short, the knee-jerk response of having the federal government take
over passenger screening is the wrong response to a real problem.
The federal government does have a role to play: It should become a
much tougher aviation-security regulator.

And
yes, airlines should be taken out of the loop so that the current
fragmented system can be turned into a single, unified security
system at each airport. That system has been proven under fire in
Israel and Europe in countries that have far more experience with
terrorism than does the United States. America should learn from
their example.

Robert W. Poole, Jr., an
MIT-trained engineer, is founder of, and Director of Transportation
Studies for, the Reason Public Policy Institute in Los Angeles,
California.

1.For further
information, contact Lawrence Whitman, Director of the Thomas A.
Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage
Foundation, at 202-608-6215, or Robert W. Poole, Jr., Director of
Transportation Studies at the Reason Public Policy Institute, at
310-391-2245.

Share

Before the United States rushes into creating a new 28,000-personfederal passenger-screening bureaucracy, it might make sense tostart with a clean sheet of paper and ask what kind of system wouldbest do the job of keeping airports and air travelers safe. Theoverwhelming evidence from other countries, especially Israel,shows that federalizing airport security is not the answer.

Rep. Peter Roskam (R-IL) says it's "a great way to start the day for any conservative who wants to get America back on track."

Sign up to start your free subscription today!

Sorry! Your form had errors:

About The Heritage Foundation

The Heritage Foundation is the nation’s most broadly supported public policy research institute, with hundreds of thousands of individual, foundation and corporate donors. Heritage, founded in February 1973, has a staff of 275 and an annual expense budget of $82.4 million.

Our mission is to formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense. Read More